"There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it: now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city." So we read in Ecclesiastes (9:14, 15). We do not know the name of the city or the identity of the poor wise man who by his prayers and spiritual wisdom brought about this deliverance. The story, however, is a pattern of what happened in Israel over and over again.
Many times the Hebrews, through prayer and absolute reliance on divine direction, were able to defeat numerically superior forces bent on their destruction. Gideon and his little band of picked men, armed with such unconventional weapons as trumpets and earthenware pitchers inside which were lamps, brought wild confusion to the Midianites. Jehoshaphat sent singers before his army to praise the beauty of holiness, and so disconcerted his enemies that they turned upon and destroyed each other. The prayers of Isaiah were instrumental in saving Jerusalem from the mighty armies of Sennacherib. And who could forget David, the shepherd boy, with his sling?
In every instance faith in God, in His ability to save and protect His children from harm, was proved a more potent weapon than instruments of war. Mary Baker Eddy tells us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 131), "The central fact of the Bible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power." This central fact has not changed. In today's world situation, as in yesterday's, the central fact is that God, good, is supreme in His own universe, that His will is potent on earth as in heaven, and that any seeming evil power can be proved impotent.
